"AVAST me hearties,” said a sailor picking up Tuesday’s front page, and seeing a beautiful picture of a tall ship, its sails billowing magnificently in the wind as it left Blyth, beneath the headline: “Anchors aweigh”.

In his crusty old seadog voice, he might have added: “They’ve got it a-right.”

“Anchor aweigh” is the correct expression for the moment an anchor is lifted from the seabed, thus allowing a ship to get underway. I must admit that until I saw the headline, I presumed the phrase was “anchors away”, which I imagined a sailor shouted as he threw his anchor overboard at the end of a voyage.

However, this is correctly expressed as casting the anchor, whereas “anchor’s aweigh” marks the beginning of a voyage. This is because the word “weigh” comes from an Old English word, “wegan”, meaning “to move or to carry”. Therefore, “to weigh anchor” is to lift it from the seabed, and the “anchor’s aweigh” when its weight is being carried by the chain.

The Americans know this, of course, as the anthem of the US Navy, written in 1906, is called Anchors Aweigh.

A really old seadog, though, would say that the “anchor’s atrip” at the precise moment it is raised from the bottom – apparently this Victorian expression signified that the anchor, which had been resting, had begun its journey, or trip, to the top.

I don’t know if this is true, but it does fit a nautical pattern. As well as aweigh, atrip and avast, there are these seafaring words: adrift, afloat, afore, aground, ahead, ahoy, aloft, ashore, astern, awash…

When I touched down at Newcastle airport at the end of my holiday, the pilot didn’t say we were “aland” – it seems only to be sailors who add an a to everything they do. Astonishing.

Anyway, having cast anchor and weighed anchor, I shall now “swallow anchor”, which is apparently what sailors do when they retire from the sea, without questioning whether the tall ships were anchored in Blyth harbour or whether they were really moored – by ropes and chains without any anchor involvement – to the harbourside.

MELVYN BRAGG’S daily 30-minute history of the north on Radio 4 this week has made fascinating listening. I liked the story about the black Frosterley marble line in the floor of the nave of Durham cathedral over which women weren’t allowed to cross because the Benedictine monks, who ran the cathedral, didn’t like women in their establishments.

In an attempt to accommodate them elsewhere, in the 13th Century, the Benedictines tried to build a Lady Chapel, with its own altar for the ladies to worship in, on the east side of the cathedral, close to St Cuthbert’s tomb.

However, they couldn’t get decent foundations and the structure quickly collapsed. This, according to the monks, proved that St Cuthbert have really disliked the idea of having women anywhere near his shrine. Women were so strictly excluded, that in 1333, when Queen Philippa, wife of King Edward III, crossed the line to find somewhere safe to sleep within the cathedral as the Scots were on the rampage, so was forced to lay her head elsewhere.

I was also pleased to learn that it was the 12th Century historian William of Malmesbury who first drew attention to the north/south divide when he wrote: “The Northumbrians talk of themselves in terms of northern granite and southern softies.” So the church’s attitude to women has changed over the centuries, but the North-East’s attitude towards southerners probably hasn’t.